This is an auspicious occasion. Last year at the end of September, I started writing here, mostly as a way to handle my own feelings of helplessness whenever I used to read the economics posts. My first post was how I felt what we were/are going through was different from the Great Depression. [Getting through the next several years]

We’ve since talked about gardening, cooking, sewing, getting a job, surviving getting fired, planning to getting fired, and how stupid and venal John Boehner is.

And I haven’t shut up ever since.

Today, I’m officially joining up with a more organized group here in terms of writing about food and food systems. It feels good not to be out in the garden alone.

I’ve been thinking about this whole ‘sustainable food’ thing. I know for a lot of us, shopping local, living la vida locovore, etc. comes with a price tag that we just don’t feel we can afford. According to one group, sustainable comes with the following:

“Sustainable agriculture is a way of growing food that is healthy, does not harm the environment, respects workers, is humane to animals, provides a fair wage to the farmer, and supports farming communities. Characteristics of this type of agriculture include: conservation and preservation, biodiversity, animal welfare, economic viability and socially just.”

[What's sustainable agriculture?]

I’m not going to talk about fairness, humane treatment of animals, biodiversity, or justice. I hope someone else today (hey, our Grand Opening!!!) will discuss those. I’m going to talk about just one thing.

Plan B (and I do not mean the Rx, either).

As many of you have noted, those who have regularly waded through the swamplike and convoluted prose that sometimes comes out of my brain, Aunt Toby is very very big on having a Plan B (and a C, D, E, F and G). No matter how well a system works or how well I plan, it never fails that disaster strikes and I do like to rehearse disasters in my brain. “What if?” is a big and ever present script that runs for me. Being prepared is part of my make-up.

Belt AND suspenders.

And here is today’s exercise (I know, I know – what’s the connection to sustainable food?):

I want us all to imagine that something absolutely dreadful happens. All transportation stops. No rail. No air. No gas or diesel powered vehicles.

And no food in the grocery stores, because by and large, for the vast majority of Americans, their food comes from very far away. No matter how blessed a certain region is in terms of climate or agriculture, our food in general comes from very far away and requires a huge expenditure of fuel to move it through the system of buyers, distributors, and warehouses to get it on the shelves of grocery stores.

If transport ceased, we would run out of food at the grocery stores very quickly.

Seventy years ago, before the advent of the interstate system and the concentration of single specialty agricultural production into specific areas of the United States, a lot of states were fairly self-sustaining in terms of food production. I recall an op-ed I read by Bob Rodale (I think this was in the mid-1980s and was in Organic Gardening) where he talked about finding statistics about the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and how much of the food that was consumed in PA was grown in PA in the mid-1930s and how much was grown in PA in the 1980s.

He was stunned to find out that in the 30s, Pennsylvania was able to produce about 70% of all the food that was eaten in the state, but that in the 1980s, it had flipped completely and only 30% of the food bought and consumed in the state was grown there. Now, one of the major differences between that time and our time is that people in the 1930s in Pennsylvania (or any place else in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast States) had no expectation that they for example, would see strawberries for sale in January. What was in grocery stores in an area was what was in season IN THAT AREA. The best consumers could hope for would be that regional refrigerated storage would hold out and that they would be able to get carrots, cabbage, potatoes, onions, apples and things like that over the winter. They knew that by the spring, all would be looking a little bit “peak-ed” as my mom used to say. If they could afford to buy frozen fruit and vegetables (and owned a refrigerator with a freezer unit in it), then their options were broader and they would be eating fruits and veggies that were in season between May and September the year before. Otherwise, their options were home or commercially canned fruits and vegetables. But still what you had were fairly local processing plants using locally grown products because quality decreases rapidly if you have to ship a truckload of green beans more than a couple of hours from the field.

Now, certainly Pennsylvania is perhaps climatically a more advantageous state than say for example northern Maine, or Montana or Wisconsin. But every state has its advantages in terms of agricultural production and what is available in season. What happened in Pennsylvania (and every place else) between the 1930s and fifty years later? I think we can all take a really good guess: cheap transportation, which made concentrating production of vegetables and fruits in places like Texas, California, and Florida and then trucking those products, out of season, in refrigerated trucks, thousands of miles, worthwhile. What that did, though, was it made it very difficult for the farmers within states to compete with out of season and out of state products.

So, they stopped doing it.

One of the things than has changed that is the whole sustainable foods, eating local, nutrition security movements. For a lot of people, currently, the price for these through farmers markets, co-ops, CSAs etc. is too high.

But if suddenly, transportation becomes too expensive, or climate change turns the California, Texas and Florida fields into so much desert, we are still going to need food and the closer it is, the better it will be for all of us.

Not only because it is fresher and perhaps tastier.

But because it is THERE. And where you can get it close by beats ‘not being able to get it any longer’ by a whole lot.

Sustainable food comes with many things besides a pricetag; one of them is a sustainable community of people who produce all sorts of food: eggs, chickens, milk, cheese, fruits, vegetables, grains (here in Upstate NY, we now have some farmers that are returning to producing grains, something they did very well and efficiently in the 19th century, but which they got competed out of when grain farming moved in a big way to the big flat fields of the Midwest). It is not just the warm fuzzies you get when you have a community of producers.

You get food security, too.

Let’s not forget what has happened to the availability of manufactured products in this country as production has moved overseas. Some people feel it is important for us as a nation to be able to produce everything we use in our daily lives. When we allow the skills, expertise, and means of production to move overseas, then we lose the option and skills to do those things for ourselves.

The same goes for food.

Sometimes sustainable food means just being able to grow it. Maybe not strawberries in January (and with greenhouses, we can do that too), but our own food. In our own regions. Within reach.

(photograph courtesy of Lebatihem)